If CasaPound are anything to go by, there was nothing proto about it. This has been building up for at least 15 years, but when the far left mentioned it to liberals they were ignored.
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I agree about the presence of the general resurgent right-wing movement and ideology in Italy and elsewhere post-9/11, but the term “alt-right” (apparently coined in Nov, 2008 – what a coincidence!) didn’t gain real widespread currency in the U.S. until late 2014. That, not co-incidentally, is when Gamergaters publically cemented the extreme right orientation of the misogynist and racist “manosphere.”
Before 2014 (but only by a few years) I knew these creeps more as “Neoreactionaries” and the “Dark Enlightenment” accelerationists associated with Land, Yarvin, and later Thiel. There were hints of sympathy to white nationalism with these types, but a full-blown open affiliation between with collection of hatemongers* didn’t emerge until after the MRAs and PUAs were drawn into what became the alt-right.
Personally, I saw the first stirrings of all this back in early 2001, when Ian Angell, an IT prof at LSE, talked about and seemed to embrace the concept of the “New Barbarians”. He was predicting elements of the brutal semi-feudal late-stage capitalist world we’re seeing now, gleefully embracing them, and advising readers on how to become winners (or “new barbarians”) in it.
Angell was approaching things from a techie Libertarian “free”-market extremist starting point, and a lot of people on the alt-right either take the same course or quickly come to integrate that philosophy into their thinking along with whatever racist and sexist and eliminationist hobbyhorses they ride.
[* e.g. fascists, neoNazis, KKKers, and other extreme-right thugs like the ones who almost killed you]
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I wonder if Hair Cheeto will be chosen the Grand Wizard… er I mean Grand Marshal for this event?
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I was into anime as a high school student (back in the days before the interwebs, when the only way to see stuff was to have connections that could bring over 2nd or 3rd generation VHS copies, or see stuff at Cons…), so the anime culture/alt-right connection is doubly weird to me. It seemed like a real mis-match, but then, I’ve never known what the Western anime culture was like - it didn’t even exist when I was watching the stuff, and I’ve never even seen 4chan - so I really don’t understand how that happened. But it sure did.
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I was into anime before high school back when the web was just being started and yeah that stuff wasn’t online I was buying fan subbed VHS tapes of Neon Genesis Evangelion before it was even sold in the US. I think I’m the active oldest customer of Joy’s japanimation in Greensburg.
And I have all of Cowboy Bebop on VHS including the one where they are looking for a VHS and I would watch it but I don’t have a VCR anymore but I enjoy the irony of owning that specific tape
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Oh hell - let these dangerous idiots bring their guns, just cordon them off somewhere safely away from everyone else.
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#notallarchitects?
The Charlottesville police were not “scared into inaction”. They were (and are) actively pro-fascist.
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